Motorola Razr: Reinventing the classic flip into a foldable phone
David . Paris Hilton. Bono. Everyone who was anyone in the early 2000s owned a Motorola Razr. With its sleek edges and metallic keyboard, it stood out from a crop of generic flip phones and made the company cool again. And it wasn't just for the elite. In its four-year run, the chic, ultra-thin handset sold 130 million units on its way to becoming one of the most beloved and iconic pieces of technology ever.
Then Apple's iPhone came along and absolutely destroyed it, along with the memory of so-called dumb phones.
Now more than a decade later, Motorola, which invented the cellphone but now toils in mobile obscurity, is staging a comeback with a reimagined Razr. It combines the retro clamshell design with Google's Android software and an innovative foldable touchscreen display that puts a new twist on the classic flip phone. CNET reviewer Jessica Dolcourt, after an early and extended look at the Razr, describes it as "Streamlined. Utterly pocketable. Nostalgic, with a sharp futuristic edge."
"We see it as a franchise," Motorola President Sergio Buniac said in an interview ahead of today's launch.
At $1,500, the new Razr is too expensive to go after even premium phones, including the iPhone 11 and Samsung's Galaxy S10. But Buniac and company are hoping that its ability to stand out from the pack -- once again -- will bring buzz back to Motorola and get consumers excited about foldables.
We could use the jolt. Foldable phones arrived with massive hype and high expectations earlier this year. They were supposed to reinvigorate the wireless world and represented a potential sea change in how we use our mobile devices. The new category was also going to serve as a bridge to the kind of sci-fi tech we see in films such as Minority Report or shows like Westworld.
That hasn't happened. Concerns about durability, exacerbated by the Samsung Galaxy Fold's early defects and Huawei's Mate X delayed launch, tanked excitement. Even Motorola missed its original target of a summer launch for the Razr. The company now will take preorders starting on Dec. 26, with Verizon releasing the phone in January as a lifetime exclusive in the US. It will launch elsewhere next year.
Eye-popping prices don't help. The Razr is five times the price of the midtier Moto G7 phone. And that's still a bargain compared with the $1,980 Galaxy Fold or $2,400 Mate X.